Aside from Mandarin Chinese and Cantonese, I’m also quite interested in Hokkien (Min-Nan), especially the Philippine variety. Unfortunately, apart from a few phrase books here and there, I haven’t really found a good searchable dictionary that I can use, so I just decided to build my own. Not having done any serious coding for many years, I felt that my coding muscles had already atrophied. Nevertheless, I managed to cobble something together.
Launch English-Hokkien Dictionary
The contents are from the Maryknoll English-Amoy Dictionary, which is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Taiwan License. I also opened source the software under an MIT License. I used the Laravel 5 and Bootstrap frameworks.
Alpha 0.1 Features and Limitations
- Very basic fulltext search without sorting for relevance
- Requires search terms with at least four characters
It’s still quite rudimentary but what I plan to do next are to use the proper accent symbols instead of the numeric representatives in the Hokkien words, fix the sorting, and allow words shorter than four characters.
Since the source dictionary is from Taiwan, the Min-Nan variant is also quite Taiwanese-centric. I’m still looking for a reliable data source of Philippine-variant Hokkien that I can use or license.